How to upload 80GB in a day with the help of a friendly ISP

I have a lot of photos I have been backing up to the cloud for a long time. I use a few services to backup my essential data:

Dropbox for all my documents (I upgraded to a 50GB account this year);

I use Picasa to backup photo albums as I go (I upgraded my Google Account’s storage to 80GB for this purpose);

I use Amazon S3 for my primary backups and I have automatic backups running through JungleDisk; and

I have a free Backupify account which I managed to grab during a promotion and which backs some Web services data up to my S3 account too.

I’ve been thinking of ways I can back my photos up to the cloud. I have about 80GB of photos I want to preserve. These are family photos and they are irreplaceable. I back them up to 3 separate physical drives but because of my MacBook Air’s relatively small hard drive (250GB just aint what it used to be) I can only keep a few albums (I keep my full iTunes library on my MacBook Air, its not practical to keep it elsewhere) on the drive. Despite this storage capacity locally, drives can fail and I almost had a huge problem when my one external drive almost failed recently, almost taking all my data with it (2 of my backup drives are partitioned with 1 partition for Time Machine and the other for general archival).

My plan has been to backup all my photos and other family data to S3 using JungleDisk but with our available transfer rates this will literally take months. I had a boost last week when I managed to upload 10GB at a conference at the CSIR but that leaves about 70GB to go and doing nightly uploads means taking my backup drive home to do it there rather than leave everything at my office.

We just can’t achieve that on the ADSL we have generally but ISP’s have much faster lines than that at their offices so I could probably backup all that data even faster. My thinking is that it is a matter of getting permission from a sympathetic ISP and agreeing on a price for that data. I pay Afrihost R950 for 100GB of data a month (we use most of it) so I’d be happy to pay that much for the 80GB I need for my photos. Its really a matter of access together with BFF status for the ISP and gratuitous posts about how awesome the bandwidth is and how hard it is to lift my jaw from the ground.

While that is first prize, another option occurred to me as I started this post. I have about 20GB of my photos on Picasa already. I still need to add the remaining 60GB and could do that incrementally through the Picasa app’s sync capability but once that is done I could use Backupify to back that data up to my S3 account. That way I have 2 online photo backups (as much as I like Google and its services, I don’t have any guarantees its services will always be available to me – S3 seems to be a little more reliable in the longer term and gives me much needed redundancy). This option still leaves me needing to upload the rest of my archived albums (once the older stuff is up, its only a matter of uploading new stuff as I go and my ADSL connection is just fine for that).

As an aside, rationalising my S3 storage will probably help get the cost down a bit too. I could then limit JungleDisk backups to lighter weight documents and data with photos going up via Picasa and Backupify.

So … any ISPs interesting in helping a guy out?

Awesome idea: Ooh ooh, just had an awesome idea for ISPs. How about offering photographers and other content creators a service to upload massive amounts of data from a location hooked up to the core network as a periodic service at a reasonable price? They could do what I want to do and arrive at an upload station with their drives, upload to their preferred cloud service and pay for the data and service! The ISPs who can accommodate that would get the credit for being utterly awesome in so many respects and the packages could be priced to manage demand. You can thank me later.